You also have to remember that $20 is still around the impulse buy point, which means that most people that aren't in financial trouble don't think a great deal about dropping $20 once in a while. On the other hand, $50 is usually enough money to require some forethought.
In any case, I don't spend $7 on any old movie, I do have to be fairly sure it will be a good one. Even then, I do complain about things like $5 drinks, because we all know it's rediculous, but that's how the theater makes money. Paying to see a movie is paying for the experience. Paying for a DVD is done in the hopes that you'll be able to watch that movie whenever you like, for quite a few years into the future. When you drop $50 on anything, you hope to get what you can out of it. Even if a game is fairly short, there are still instances where the cost is justified because of replayability or multiplayer features, such as Mario Kart and Half-Life (for the latter; ok maybe Half-Life isn't short, but it put me to sleep too many times in single player to be worth $50 for that alone) and Diablo (for the former).
Re:Are my eyes deceiving me???
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Cube House
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· Score: 1
My floor is some butt-ugly red colour and the cube walls are only about 4 ft high (max, I dont have a tape measure atm). Other than that, it seems close enough. It's really not very conducive to work once you notice that no one's going to notice you're not working because they're not working, either, but at first it's deceptive because everyone can see at least 25% of the other employees' monitors (at least of those 75-85% of us that work in cubes).
System Shock, then Half Life, and then later Deus Ex were so successful--at least in the critical establishment, if not popularly--precisely because they integrated adventure gaming elements into FPS.
The games System Shock and Deus Ex took their inspiration from RPGs, and especially in the case of Deus Ex the elements wouldn't even be recognizable as part of the Adventure genre (a full skill system with level gains). Half-Life took most of it's influence from later platform gaming, which is especially evident in the Xen levels. Puzzle elements exist in most genres, not just adventure games. Puzzles and strong story are just core parts of adventure games, they aren't elements unique to the genre. The fact that FPS games actually have strong story elements (the case of all 3 of these games) doesn't mean that they integrated adventure gaming, as eventually all genres (except the most basic, pure parts of a genre) need to tell a story.
Adventure gaming didn't die, it just got folded into other genres.
When something gets folded into other genres to the point that the original genre no longer exists, it's dead. That being said, there are many small developers and publishers still putting out adventure games in the more pure sense (even though the purity of various sub-genres, such as graphic adventures, was debated strongly at it's initial introduction).
I still play text IF, and love it. But I do think more could be done to improve the status of adventure gaming more generally.
One thing I would like to see that would raise the status of adventure gaming is adventure-action games--as opposed to action-adventure games ala Half Life, NOLF, etc. That is, first-person games that include action as well as adventure gaming, but emphasize the puzzle-solving and environment exploration over action.
Why not simply an adventure game with full FPS exploration elements? Co-opt the FP of FPS into the adventure format rather than trying to make an action game with adventure elements. Adventure games in general shun the action elements to begin with, and there are plenty of action-adventure games, as you stated (but since action-adventure is more a description than a genre, who really cares?).
Project Eden [eidosinteractive.com]
I never played it, so I can't really comment on it. I tend to avoid anything published by Eidos unless I hear extremely good things about the game.
Among current games, Deus Ex 2 may fit this characterization somewhat. But even that game doesn't emphasize the puzzle-solving as much as it does RPG and nonlinearity of action gameplay. It's not really the same.
Exactly. Adventure games tend to shy away from action and especially from combat. That may be part of why they've become more limited in scope, but I tend to think the publishers and developers just painted themselves into a corner and took all the wrong ways out. They moved to 3D before 3D was really mature enough to handle their vision. 2D adventure games started to get more and more derivative, and overall they were spending far more money on the games than they could hope to make. Also, the inclusion of Myst as an adventure title and it's success lead to a deluge of similar games. Though there were earlier titles similar to Myst, none had done as well, and that one title inspired publishers to dump tons of cash on crappy titles (just as FPS and RTS games also did in the 90s).
I think you're right that the pure adventure game, with a few remarkable exceptions--e.g., The Longest Journey--is no longer tenable. However, I do think it's possible to create games that are easily identified as being more in the adventure genre than other genres. I just think few developers are taking this really seriously.
Big publishers are afraid to take risks, and it's as simple as that. If someone came forward with a nearly complete, beautifully real-time-rendered 3D adventure game with an FPS-like engine and freedom of movement similar to GTA3/VC, they probably still couldn't get it published because the genre is 'dead' and they don't think they can make money on it.
I know, this is Slashdot, but you didn't even read the first page or two of the article, did you? They go through a lot of hoops to try to come up with a coherent definition of the genre despite most fans of the genre being more capable of identifying the genre of the games by playing them than describing the genre.
In the 2D console days, most side-scrolling games could be considered an adventure game.
No, the Adventure genre actually takes it's name primarily from the console game Adventure, which is, of course, a text-based adventure game. Side-scrolling games tend to fall into either platformers or shooters. In the days of the NES, Nintendo liked to try to label the content of the games (Action, Adventure, etc), but they weren't very concerned with genre. The only time they really bowed to genre labels was when they couldn't easily use their descriptions.
Once the PC gained popularity, most of your point and click games, like Myst, were classified as adventure.
Myst wasn't classified as an adventure until quite a while after it's release, as it didn't fit the conventional genre label. It was considered a puzzle game when it was released.
Now, the adventure genre disintegrated into various other genres.
The adventure genre was (is) probably one of the stodgiest genres in terms of keeping out change. This has pretty much driven it to smaller publishers, as the larger publishers had a hard time selling titles that were either highly derivative or changed too much (3D especially). Other genres, as they've matured, have co-opted various features from adventure games, but this is inevitable as adventure games are more or less story-telling puzzle games, and most mature genres will eventually incorporate both strong stories and puzzles.
Most titles could be considered adventurous, whether they be first-person, third-person, side-scrolling, RPG, point and click, etc. I don't think that the adventure genre should really be considered a genre in which you classify games at all, because the term adventure covers so much ground. In fact, I would even go as far to say that past games shouldn't have been called adventure games, either.
Genres named after generic terms often have these kinds of problems, but frankly the problem is not with the genre, it is simply your lack of understanding of what the genre is. Adventure games don't even have to be adventurous at their core, and a game is not a part of the genre (or even incorporating genre elements) just because it contains adventure or is adventurous.
There were three (?) GB FF 'Adventure' games, as well. They were, as I remember, much like Zelda 2. An adventure game with RPG elements like experience building. Pretty much an action-RPG.
Those games were originally part of the SaGa line, renamed for US release to capitalize on the success of the NES/SNES FF games. The Mystic Quest game was originally going to be a North America-only release which was severely dumbed down from the rest of the line, but was eventually released in Japan anyway because the Japanese audience thought they were missing out on something.
The primary difference between adventure and RPG games is that adventure games don't usually involve character building. Almost everything descends from text adventures simply because text adventures were among the first games developed. However, graphical adventures show a fairly obvious direct line back to text adventures, as they were originally little more than text adventures with pictures. Then along came Myst and the Lucas Arts and Sierra games. Next came a handful of 3D games that convinced everyone that the genre was no longer profitable, when in reality they simply moved to 3D before everyone was really ready to move on. Or maybe they simply spent too much money on their last few 2D games, too, and over-estimated the market in a time when FPS and RTS were taking over the market.
I'm not sure how well the Myst series has done, but I'd imagine well enough, since they keep releasing sequels. RPGs and Adventure games, though, have only a small amount of crossover in their audiences, so the continued success of RPGs, especially on consoles, where they never really faltered, doesn't apply to adventure games. Then again, the RPG on computers was all but dead outside of MMO games until Baldur's Gate came along.
I don't have a problem with video game violence for the most part, but there are a few titles that have taken it too far.
Who's to determine what's too far? Any other entertainment industry that has ever tried to censor itself or that has been censored has turned their product into crap until the artists began rejecting the censorship.
The worst one this year was Manhunt by far, but it's not alone. As it stands, the gaming industry is still not looked positively upon by most people. Games like Manhunt aren't helping the industry at all.
Some people will never look at the industry in a positive light. In terms of sheer numbers, for every Manhunt there are how many E-T rated games? Have you even played Manhunt? (it's getting to the point where I might have to buy this damned game just to figure out why so many people are bitching about it, especially when most of them don't seem to have played it).
Same thing goes for games like DOA Volleyball and BMX XXX - the sexual content adds nothing to the game, and only hurts the industry.
Interestingly enough, on one hand, DOA XVB, you have a game that actually sold moderately well. On the other hand, BMX XXX, you have a game that didn't sell well at all. I wonder why that may be. Oh yeah, because one appealed to a particular audience and the other, well, didn't. The same people that call out game developers for DOA are the ones that should be abstaining from all David Hasslehoff material because of Baywatch. We certainly know that no actresses were hired for that show due to their ability to act.
If we ever want to get to a point where we don't hear constant stories about how gaming influences murderers or makes people violent, reclusive, horny old men, these games will have to stop coming out...or possibly become so mainstream that no one blinks at DOA Extreme Nude Hockey
You can see much worse in other media. You will always hear the stories, and if you really wanted to stop them short all you'd have to do is create some new media that kids and teenagers enjoy. The real backlash will continue until the current 18-25 group is in control of the country. Even then you'll see some of it, and it will probably continue for at least another generation. In the meantime, there aren't many people protesting showings of the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so I'm not too worried about the future of video games unless gamers themselves start to actually swallow the anti-game crap and spew it themselves. Self-censorship has proven itself to often be worse than (U.S.) government actions, primarily because government has to be careful to not run the Constitution through the shredder while they're at it.
I can think of a couple of games off the top of my head that feature full-frontal nudity of non-live characters (Leisure Suit Larry 7, Max Payne 2) and received M (not AO) ratings. There's probably at least a couple more.
And I can think of a couple of movies that showed full-frontal nudity of live people that received R ratings. Since I haven't played either Leisure Suit Larry 7 or Max Payne 2, I couldn't tell you if the depictions fit the definitions on the ESRB site, but that site does describe partial nudity as 'brief and mild depictions of nudity'. This as compared to 'graphic depictions of sex' under the AO rating.
Yes, it is lowered expectations, because the system has a 1.5 GB disc, you shouldn't expect it to mystically hold more data. If it's a PC, you have a hard drive, and though game developers seem to think it's perfectly all right to swap discs after you've installed most of the data to your drive, I do not (hence I've used no-CD cracks on any game I expect to play in single player only that I have purchased for my PC). If it's a PS2, I don't expect a disc to hold more than a single-layered DVD, and if it's an XBox, I don't expect a disc to hold more than a double-layered DVD. Furthermore, even though the XBox has a hard drive, I don't expect to have to install a game before I play it.
the data on a different drive thing makes sense for mp3s, movies, documents... but not for much else, at least under windows. The registry makes sure of that.
Exactly, data. When it comes to programs themselves, it doesn't really matter unless the particular program is written so that it won't write the same files over themselves when you reinstall it.
I only mention this because I've had a lot of problems at work as a result of our server setup guy subscribing to this philosophy. Sure, a 6GB windows partition and a 40 GB data partition for programs sounds nice, but when C fills up you're hosed.
6GB is a little too small anyway, because there are always some programs that love putting crap on the same drive as Windows regardless of whether or not you're installing them there, or, even better, add things to the Windows directory. I simply try never to keep anything on the same drive as Windows that I would miss if I had to format the drive for some reason.
Isn't having to swap at all an unacceptable compromise?
Unacceptable? On consoles? Not really. I still have plenty of games that I have to swap discs on because they're over 650MB.
On the other hand, if this were a PC we were talking about, I'd agree, because the PC has a hard drive and, if I choose the largest installation option, I shouldn't have to swap discs while I'm playing.
I mean, if the game was bigger than oh say 8GB I guess swapping would be ok, but lets not make it alright when the game is less than 2GB.
What about 4GB? Or, to make the number more accurate, 4.7GB? At that point you'll probably be swapping discs on some DVD-based consoles, depending on whether or not the console reads double-layered game discs.
While the Cube's discs aren't big enough for most of the FF games produced for the PS1 and PS2 to fit on a single disc, they have been an acceptable size for the majority of the content currently available on their platform.
I didn't realize all the new Dell's come with DVD drives... are they standard?
They are, as I said, except on the lowest-priced PCs. Even then, it costs about $30 to upgrade to a 16x DVD-ROM drive from the 48X CD-ROM drive (and they're putting CD-RW drives in there for the second drive for XMas).
It would be (presumably) extremely difficult to do GTA as a multidisc since (presumably) the map streams from the disc. There would be a point in the city where crossing the street meant switching discs. Ugh.
More than likely they could cut between discs when moving from city to city, just as GTA:VC and GTA3 on the PS2 gives you loading screens between cities (and between missions). If you line up your content so that a disc switch happens in the same place as a major loading point on the PS2, it's not as big of a problem as it might seem.
That being said, the compressed textures and so forth on the PC/XBox version are higher quality than those on the PS2 version, leading to larger storage requirements, which may or may not be needed if they were to do a Cube port (then again, if they didn't do a port of higher quality than the PS2 version, people would complain).
Personally, I'm still trying to justify buying the XBox double pack when I already have the PS2 games, and it's just not getting through the logic gates in my head. Considering the PS2 double pack is $10 cheaper, I doubt I'll get much for trade-in.
FF1 and FF2 (Japanese FF2, not the FF2 that was released on SNES, which is part of another PS FF package, either Chronicles or Anthology) were released earlier this year on the PS as FF Origins.
I always thought that was a bit strange also. Most games come on 1-2 CD's, with a few coming in at 3. Very few have 4 or more (a couple notable examples would be Myst III: Exile, and Buldar's Gate). I believe Buldar's Gate had a separate version available for DVD, but I'm not sure about Myst III. My only assumption is that either they're concerned about too few consumers having DVD drives, or the cost to create DVD disks is higher than I would expect.
Most of the titles using the engine from Baldur's Gate came in at 3-5 CDs. The first Baldur's Gate was the only one released on DVD afaik, and I had to look for quite a while to get it on DVD, too. Riven (Myst 2) came on DVD with one of my DVD-ROM drives. For a very short time, Fry's had a section of DVD-ROM based games, and it had a good number of titles (though small compared to even the Mac games section), but eventually publishers stopped even trying. Then again, I've heard that a couple of games coming down the pipe will be DVD, including HL2.
Aside from that, the gamers that spend $400 on a video card absolutely have DVD drives... probably DVD+/-RW drives at this point. However, that's only a relatively small niche market. If they're going to market a game, they want to reach the largest possible user base, and when the PC is concerned, that must be the CD drive... at least for another couple years. Eventually there will be an obvious shift away from the CD format. It'll probably happen as soon as Dell decides that the CD is obsolete, and DVD is the future. On the other hand, maybe they're waiting for the next big innovation in portable storage.
The funny part is that all of Dell's computers except for the absolute lowest-priced advertised PCs come with DVD-ROM drives. I think the real problem is that most of the publishers have taken DVD-ROM as a dual-format push, releasing on both CD-ROM and DVD-ROM, with the DVDs usually getting smaller numbers printed. This leads to it costing more to publish on DVD, even though the added cost is really only because it's a limited run in addition to the CD run. If a good title is released on DVD only, it would show them where the numbers really are, and push adoption for those few people that are lagging behind (when I mention DVD-ROM to people that don't have them in their computers, they ask why they would want to watch movies on their computers, it'd be nice if there was actual content for them to see). Something else that people still don't seem to understand is that DVD-ROM drives are perfectly capable of reading CD-ROM discs.
Which he said, though I think you might be thinking of FF1 being on a single CD with FF2. He was most likely referring to FFVII, VIII, and IX, which are multi-CD titles on the PS1 and still took up enough space to be multi-disc titles on the GameCube, if it weren't for the amount of duplication between discs.
2. GTA Vice City fits in under 2 PC CD ROMs AFAIK given most CD are 700 or 1.4 GB 1.5GB CD that gamecube has
Most CDs are 650MB, but that's beside the point. You also have to remember that you're installing that on your hard drive with the PC (at least I would hope so), so it's compressed data that is extracted to your drive. How big is your Vice City directory? Also, since it is installed to the drive, they don't need to repeat any of the data on both discs, as they would have to with a console title.
3. games are getting close enough to need multiple DVDs!!! FUCK! Final Fantasy XI on PS2 comes pre-installed on the HD why?
Close, yes, but they're not there, yet. Plus, you have the differences in DVD formats and the seeming reluctance to do double-sided discs (which would still have most of the problems of multi-disc releases).
a. people don't want to install games.
b. it's too big. it took 5 PC CD ROMs and 2.5 hrs of updates on cable/dsl
Even with 700MB CDs completely filled with data, that's still 3.5GB, which leaves plenty of space on a DVD-ROM. Still, without compression, it does get tight on a single layer, single sided DVD. Not to mention the fact that you'll need the hard drive anyway to play the game, and that console players wouldn't want to spend the time to install (as you said in a) a 3.5GB game to the hard drive as well as downloading whatever updates are available the first time they connect (which, given that the drive won't be out for a few months, could be quite a bit).
so yes multiple disks are "difficult" for developers to handle but they've done it before.
It's not even really difficult, it's just wasteful in terms of having to repeat content across discs when you're dealing with consoles. Some developers still use CDs for PS2 games, it all just depends on how much space they need. Obviously, for most of them, it's cheaper to use DVDs once they get past 650MB, but they'll still use CDs for single-disc titles if they can (though they probably wouldn't do additional work to make the game fit on a CD if it's close to the barrier). I'm about 90% sure that there are maybe 1 or 2 games out there that use multiple discs on the Cube, but I don't know what they are and don't own them (anyone else know?).
Of course, I have games on my PC that span multiple discs and take up 2-4GB of hard drive space, and they're not exactly new games. At the same time, PC developers seem quite reluctant to move to DVD-ROM format, as they seem to believe that the same gamers that spend $400 on video cards won't spend $40 on a DVD-ROM drive.
Back then you didn't use a mouse to install an OS;p Hell, even with Win95 it usually made such a mess of itself that it was best to format and install DOS before trying to put Win95 back on there.
Of course, if I had been more knowledgable, I might've been able to boot from a DOS disk and fix the configuration files that the game had decided needed to be rewritten in ASCII Chinese.
I never really got into Dark Reign. It probably has the MOST features of any RTS but it was too much. One of the problems when you add complexity is that you lose gameplay and the weaknesses in the AI start to show.
I didn't really have any problems with it, except that on occasion you had to micro-manage it a bit with the pathfinding AI (which was a sore point for most RTS games at that time). Support units certainly worked much better in that game than I've seen them work in any game since, excepting the case of support units being spawned from the units they support (such as the repair drones in C&C Generals and the carriers in StarCraft). IIRC, though, the default AI behaviors were not optimal in Dark Reign, but you could set the defaults at the building that produced them (again, I could be off here, I'm also pretty sure TA did the same, so I could be confusing them, and I certainly played TA much more recently than last time I tried to play DR). Dark Reign 2 had a beautiful 3D engine, but for some reason I never really got into it. DR and it's expansion also had good music in Redbook audio format, so one of my friends ended up borrowing my expansion disc and still had it in his CD changer when I moved across the country;(
Since RTS is my favourite genre, I played a lot of the ones (up until 2000 or so when I ended up unemployd after graduating from school:( ). One of my favourite ones (which kind of sucked but was fun) was KKND (Kommand, Kill 'N Destroy?) Ever heard of that? Not very popular but a fun game.
I remember KKND, but I'm not sure if I actually bought & played it. I mostly remember being slightly irritated at how antiquated StarCraft seemed when I bought it (especially after TA and DR), yet somehow getting sucked into the single player game and enjoying it anyway. With XMas coming up, I might not have time, but maybe I'll start pulling out all of my old RTS games and giving them another run, at the very least to find out how many of them work under WinXP and manage to run at normal speeds on a 2GHz CPU (which I know DR won't do).
Another good one was Homeworld (which I didn't buy/play for some reason). That's not like a traditional RTS but it was innovative.
Yep, I have Homeworld, and I think I somehow got Cataclysm for free (or maybe very cheap, I don't remember exactly). I didn't play through very much of it, though it was at the very least a strong push towards a style of game that I would enjoy. It was very cool sending off swarms of ships through full 3D space to attack enemy units from above or below and having fully 3D formations. This was especially cool considering that most other RTS games hadn't even figured out yet that air units could fly through the same area without colliding and that elevated ground meant more than just an area ground units might not be able to pass through directly.
Doom 64 wasn't a direct port. It had entirely new maps, a few new enemies, and two new weapons (some hell lazer and the Doom II double shotgun).
That's all nice, but were the graphics any different? Adding in some weapons, maps, and enemies doesn't really change the appearance of the game, nor the way the game plays. Overall, though, since I never had an N64, nor play many FPS games on consoles, I really wouldn't know beyond the fact that every Doom port I've seen has been basically the same as the original (excepting the modifications made to the Doom source release made precisely to add new features).
...and a GameCube, and probably still pay less than you would for a PS2.
Which, of course, is the problem with the Q (not to mention the limited distribution since it's not available in the US except through importers). You combine 2 different devices that are each available for ~$100 today, and it comes out to $400? Umm yeah, that'll sell.
Do you think Finding Nemo would have 15 million units sold already if Blockbuster wasn't buying ~80 copies per store?
I don't know, but every Wal-Mart I've been to has been buying more than that, and they weren't staying on shelves very long the first week they had them.
How many locations does Blockbuster have in the USA right now?
The last estimate I saw was 4500, but that was a bit old.
Hollywood Video is just a poor imitation of Blockbuster, always has been.
In the end of 2002 (when Blockbuster's stock was finally turning around) Hollywood Video had already had 8 straight quarters outperforming Blockbuster (in terms of percentage growth), with 1/3rd the stores (in significantly less time). If Hollywood did nothing else in those 8 quarters, it was convincing Blockbuster that they had to step up by extending their rental periods (when Hollywood Video showed up in San Diego, Blockbuster had 2 day rentals, Hollywood had 5 day rentals, and that was for old movies in both cases, with 1 and 2 days respectively for new releases). Hollywood also stocked DVDs for almost a full year before Blockbuster had them, and as a result Hollywood's selection of DVDs was better for at least a year after Blockbuster started carrying them.
Despite another poster's assertion that Hollywood's a subsidiary, the FTC blocked every attempt I could find of a merger or even the slightest hint of a deal between the two. There is some information that some higher-ups in Blockbuster purchased stock in Hollywood as private investors, but that doesn't make them a subsidiary of Blockbuster (it does lead to some questions on conflicts of interest, though).
Hmm, I didn't realize that game was that old (and I looked it up just now, looks like July 01). I've only had digital cable for about 6 months, so it's been X-Play almost the entire time I've been watching it regularly (then again, I used to watch it on satellite as Extended Play, but that was almost 3 years ago and not regularly).
The episode in which he talked about Ico was more than likely an episode maybe 2 months ago about under-appreciated games. He still managed to act like a moron while talking about Ico, though.
What I mean is that a lot of the games (not by choice) were easier to look at. Too many of the more recent games have gone "muddy low-contrast black and brown" making things rather hard to see. The worst I would say is Doom for the N-64: all dark brown and black with a few flashes of red and green here and there. Now, while it wasn't realistic, there was no annoying and pointless urge to aim a flashlight at the screen when you played old Atari-2600 "Adventure" or "Breakout"
What you must realize is that Doom is a bad example, being a 10-year-old game with a limited colour pallete caused by it's original platform's limitations at the time of creation. Most of the console versions of Doom were not much more than ports, with little to no enhancements (except, of course, to get them to work with the controllers). The same could be said about Quake, despite having steeper requirements than Doom. Q2 and Q3 had much richer colour palletes than either Doom or Q1. Many other games, even from the same time period, had better diversity in the colours used.
Not all modern games are this way, and the "cel-animation style" trend is a refreshing step toward clarity, and recent "Final Fantasy" games appear to be stepping out of the Dark Ages, achieving leading-edge "realism" without the darkness and fuzziness.
It's all a matter of the style of the game. The dark and dingy look was part of the game's look and feel in most cases, and if you didn't like it, it just meant that you didn't like that game. Even FF games from the same time period as Doom had a brighter look to them, before 'realism' started creeping in on them. Cel shading is just another look made possible by technology, and has just started to be used appropriately within the last year or so.
The Atari 2600 stuff was limited by the system's pallete. Doom and Quake were limited by the number of colours you could display while maintaining real-time play (meaning that even though a computer was capable of displaying more colours than an Atari 2600, you still could only display so many colours on the screen before your framerate went to hell while trying to render 3D images). Current games rarely run into problems with the number of colours displayed on the screen, and Q3 was among the first to actually show the usefulness of fully-realized 32-bit colour. Now, of course, John Carmack is talking about pushing on to 64-bit colour, which currently isn't supported by most hardware, and could offer who knows what kind of accuracy in displayed images.
Why not put such documents in a more Portable Document Format? Even assuming I have Word Reader or Openoffice, why on earth would you dissemante information via a word processor document format?
On Windows you have to install non-MS software to read PDF documents. This means that not only will some of MS' customers not be able to read it without downloading something, but also that anyone that can read it is using someone else's software to read it. Given this, I'm amazed Microsoft distributes anything in PDF, or even admits it exists.
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You also have to remember that $20 is still around the impulse buy point, which means that most people that aren't in financial trouble don't think a great deal about dropping $20 once in a while. On the other hand, $50 is usually enough money to require some forethought.
In any case, I don't spend $7 on any old movie, I do have to be fairly sure it will be a good one. Even then, I do complain about things like $5 drinks, because we all know it's rediculous, but that's how the theater makes money. Paying to see a movie is paying for the experience. Paying for a DVD is done in the hopes that you'll be able to watch that movie whenever you like, for quite a few years into the future. When you drop $50 on anything, you hope to get what you can out of it. Even if a game is fairly short, there are still instances where the cost is justified because of replayability or multiplayer features, such as Mario Kart and Half-Life (for the latter; ok maybe Half-Life isn't short, but it put me to sleep too many times in single player to be worth $50 for that alone) and Diablo (for the former).
My floor is some butt-ugly red colour and the cube walls are only about 4 ft high (max, I dont have a tape measure atm). Other than that, it seems close enough. It's really not very conducive to work once you notice that no one's going to notice you're not working because they're not working, either, but at first it's deceptive because everyone can see at least 25% of the other employees' monitors (at least of those 75-85% of us that work in cubes).
System Shock, then Half Life, and then later Deus Ex were so successful--at least in the critical establishment, if not popularly--precisely because they integrated adventure gaming elements into FPS.
The games System Shock and Deus Ex took their inspiration from RPGs, and especially in the case of Deus Ex the elements wouldn't even be recognizable as part of the Adventure genre (a full skill system with level gains). Half-Life took most of it's influence from later platform gaming, which is especially evident in the Xen levels. Puzzle elements exist in most genres, not just adventure games. Puzzles and strong story are just core parts of adventure games, they aren't elements unique to the genre. The fact that FPS games actually have strong story elements (the case of all 3 of these games) doesn't mean that they integrated adventure gaming, as eventually all genres (except the most basic, pure parts of a genre) need to tell a story.
Adventure gaming didn't die, it just got folded into other genres.
When something gets folded into other genres to the point that the original genre no longer exists, it's dead. That being said, there are many small developers and publishers still putting out adventure games in the more pure sense (even though the purity of various sub-genres, such as graphic adventures, was debated strongly at it's initial introduction).
I still play text IF, and love it. But I do think more could be done to improve the status of adventure gaming more generally.
One thing I would like to see that would raise the status of adventure gaming is adventure-action games--as opposed to action-adventure games ala Half Life, NOLF, etc. That is, first-person games that include action as well as adventure gaming, but emphasize the puzzle-solving and environment exploration over action.
Why not simply an adventure game with full FPS exploration elements? Co-opt the FP of FPS into the adventure format rather than trying to make an action game with adventure elements. Adventure games in general shun the action elements to begin with, and there are plenty of action-adventure games, as you stated (but since action-adventure is more a description than a genre, who really cares?).
Project Eden [eidosinteractive.com]
I never played it, so I can't really comment on it. I tend to avoid anything published by Eidos unless I hear extremely good things about the game.
Among current games, Deus Ex 2 may fit this characterization somewhat. But even that game doesn't emphasize the puzzle-solving as much as it does RPG and nonlinearity of action gameplay. It's not really the same.
Exactly. Adventure games tend to shy away from action and especially from combat. That may be part of why they've become more limited in scope, but I tend to think the publishers and developers just painted themselves into a corner and took all the wrong ways out. They moved to 3D before 3D was really mature enough to handle their vision. 2D adventure games started to get more and more derivative, and overall they were spending far more money on the games than they could hope to make. Also, the inclusion of Myst as an adventure title and it's success lead to a deluge of similar games. Though there were earlier titles similar to Myst, none had done as well, and that one title inspired publishers to dump tons of cash on crappy titles (just as FPS and RTS games also did in the 90s).
I think you're right that the pure adventure game, with a few remarkable exceptions--e.g., The Longest Journey--is no longer tenable. However, I do think it's possible to create games that are easily identified as being more in the adventure genre than other genres. I just think few developers are taking this really seriously.
Big publishers are afraid to take risks, and it's as simple as that. If someone came forward with a nearly complete, beautifully real-time-rendered 3D adventure game with an FPS-like engine and freedom of movement similar to GTA3/VC, they probably still couldn't get it published because the genre is 'dead' and they don't think they can make money on it.
I know, this is Slashdot, but you didn't even read the first page or two of the article, did you? They go through a lot of hoops to try to come up with a coherent definition of the genre despite most fans of the genre being more capable of identifying the genre of the games by playing them than describing the genre.
In the 2D console days, most side-scrolling games could be considered an adventure game.
No, the Adventure genre actually takes it's name primarily from the console game Adventure, which is, of course, a text-based adventure game. Side-scrolling games tend to fall into either platformers or shooters. In the days of the NES, Nintendo liked to try to label the content of the games (Action, Adventure, etc), but they weren't very concerned with genre. The only time they really bowed to genre labels was when they couldn't easily use their descriptions.
Once the PC gained popularity, most of your point and click games, like Myst, were classified as adventure.
Myst wasn't classified as an adventure until quite a while after it's release, as it didn't fit the conventional genre label. It was considered a puzzle game when it was released.
Now, the adventure genre disintegrated into various other genres.
The adventure genre was (is) probably one of the stodgiest genres in terms of keeping out change. This has pretty much driven it to smaller publishers, as the larger publishers had a hard time selling titles that were either highly derivative or changed too much (3D especially). Other genres, as they've matured, have co-opted various features from adventure games, but this is inevitable as adventure games are more or less story-telling puzzle games, and most mature genres will eventually incorporate both strong stories and puzzles.
Most titles could be considered adventurous, whether they be first-person, third-person, side-scrolling, RPG, point and click, etc. I don't think that the adventure genre should really be considered a genre in which you classify games at all, because the term adventure covers so much ground. In fact, I would even go as far to say that past games shouldn't have been called adventure games, either.
Genres named after generic terms often have these kinds of problems, but frankly the problem is not with the genre, it is simply your lack of understanding of what the genre is. Adventure games don't even have to be adventurous at their core, and a game is not a part of the genre (or even incorporating genre elements) just because it contains adventure or is adventurous.
There were three (?) GB FF 'Adventure' games, as well. They were, as I remember, much like Zelda 2. An adventure game with RPG elements like experience building. Pretty much an action-RPG.
Those games were originally part of the SaGa line, renamed for US release to capitalize on the success of the NES/SNES FF games. The Mystic Quest game was originally going to be a North America-only release which was severely dumbed down from the rest of the line, but was eventually released in Japan anyway because the Japanese audience thought they were missing out on something.
The primary difference between adventure and RPG games is that adventure games don't usually involve character building. Almost everything descends from text adventures simply because text adventures were among the first games developed. However, graphical adventures show a fairly obvious direct line back to text adventures, as they were originally little more than text adventures with pictures. Then along came Myst and the Lucas Arts and Sierra games. Next came a handful of 3D games that convinced everyone that the genre was no longer profitable, when in reality they simply moved to 3D before everyone was really ready to move on. Or maybe they simply spent too much money on their last few 2D games, too, and over-estimated the market in a time when FPS and RTS were taking over the market.
I'm not sure how well the Myst series has done, but I'd imagine well enough, since they keep releasing sequels. RPGs and Adventure games, though, have only a small amount of crossover in their audiences, so the continued success of RPGs, especially on consoles, where they never really faltered, doesn't apply to adventure games. Then again, the RPG on computers was all but dead outside of MMO games until Baldur's Gate came along.
Slow news day? Everyone knows it was the Wilhelm scream- it's talked about all the time on StarWars.com and most geeks do know about it.
It must be, because the article is over 2 years old.
I don't have a problem with video game violence for the most part, but there are a few titles that have taken it too far.
Who's to determine what's too far? Any other entertainment industry that has ever tried to censor itself or that has been censored has turned their product into crap until the artists began rejecting the censorship.
The worst one this year was Manhunt by far, but it's not alone. As it stands, the gaming industry is still not looked positively upon by most people. Games like Manhunt aren't helping the industry at all.
Some people will never look at the industry in a positive light. In terms of sheer numbers, for every Manhunt there are how many E-T rated games? Have you even played Manhunt? (it's getting to the point where I might have to buy this damned game just to figure out why so many people are bitching about it, especially when most of them don't seem to have played it).
Same thing goes for games like DOA Volleyball and BMX XXX - the sexual content adds nothing to the game, and only hurts the industry.
Interestingly enough, on one hand, DOA XVB, you have a game that actually sold moderately well. On the other hand, BMX XXX, you have a game that didn't sell well at all. I wonder why that may be. Oh yeah, because one appealed to a particular audience and the other, well, didn't. The same people that call out game developers for DOA are the ones that should be abstaining from all David Hasslehoff material because of Baywatch. We certainly know that no actresses were hired for that show due to their ability to act.
If we ever want to get to a point where we don't hear constant stories about how gaming influences murderers or makes people violent, reclusive, horny old men, these games will have to stop coming out...or possibly become so mainstream that no one blinks at DOA Extreme Nude Hockey
You can see much worse in other media. You will always hear the stories, and if you really wanted to stop them short all you'd have to do is create some new media that kids and teenagers enjoy. The real backlash will continue until the current 18-25 group is in control of the country. Even then you'll see some of it, and it will probably continue for at least another generation. In the meantime, there aren't many people protesting showings of the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so I'm not too worried about the future of video games unless gamers themselves start to actually swallow the anti-game crap and spew it themselves. Self-censorship has proven itself to often be worse than (U.S.) government actions, primarily because government has to be careful to not run the Constitution through the shredder while they're at it.
I can think of a couple of games off the top of my head that feature full-frontal nudity of non-live characters (Leisure Suit Larry 7, Max Payne 2) and received M (not AO) ratings. There's probably at least a couple more.
And I can think of a couple of movies that showed full-frontal nudity of live people that received R ratings. Since I haven't played either Leisure Suit Larry 7 or Max Payne 2, I couldn't tell you if the depictions fit the definitions on the ESRB site, but that site does describe partial nudity as 'brief and mild depictions of nudity'. This as compared to 'graphic depictions of sex' under the AO rating.
Yes, it is lowered expectations, because the system has a 1.5 GB disc, you shouldn't expect it to mystically hold more data. If it's a PC, you have a hard drive, and though game developers seem to think it's perfectly all right to swap discs after you've installed most of the data to your drive, I do not (hence I've used no-CD cracks on any game I expect to play in single player only that I have purchased for my PC). If it's a PS2, I don't expect a disc to hold more than a single-layered DVD, and if it's an XBox, I don't expect a disc to hold more than a double-layered DVD. Furthermore, even though the XBox has a hard drive, I don't expect to have to install a game before I play it.
the data on a different drive thing makes sense for mp3s, movies, documents... but not for much else, at least under windows. The registry makes sure of that.
Exactly, data. When it comes to programs themselves, it doesn't really matter unless the particular program is written so that it won't write the same files over themselves when you reinstall it.
I only mention this because I've had a lot of problems at work as a result of our server setup guy subscribing to this philosophy. Sure, a 6GB windows partition and a 40 GB data partition for programs sounds nice, but when C fills up you're hosed.
6GB is a little too small anyway, because there are always some programs that love putting crap on the same drive as Windows regardless of whether or not you're installing them there, or, even better, add things to the Windows directory. I simply try never to keep anything on the same drive as Windows that I would miss if I had to format the drive for some reason.
Isn't having to swap at all an unacceptable compromise?
Unacceptable? On consoles? Not really. I still have plenty of games that I have to swap discs on because they're over 650MB.
On the other hand, if this were a PC we were talking about, I'd agree, because the PC has a hard drive and, if I choose the largest installation option, I shouldn't have to swap discs while I'm playing.
I mean, if the game was bigger than oh say 8GB I guess swapping would be ok, but lets not make it alright when the game is less than 2GB.
What about 4GB? Or, to make the number more accurate, 4.7GB? At that point you'll probably be swapping discs on some DVD-based consoles, depending on whether or not the console reads double-layered game discs.
While the Cube's discs aren't big enough for most of the FF games produced for the PS1 and PS2 to fit on a single disc, they have been an acceptable size for the majority of the content currently available on their platform.
I didn't realize all the new Dell's come with DVD drives... are they standard?
They are, as I said, except on the lowest-priced PCs. Even then, it costs about $30 to upgrade to a 16x DVD-ROM drive from the 48X CD-ROM drive (and they're putting CD-RW drives in there for the second drive for XMas).
It would be (presumably) extremely difficult to do GTA as a multidisc since (presumably) the map streams from the disc. There would be a point in the city where crossing the street meant switching discs. Ugh.
More than likely they could cut between discs when moving from city to city, just as GTA:VC and GTA3 on the PS2 gives you loading screens between cities (and between missions). If you line up your content so that a disc switch happens in the same place as a major loading point on the PS2, it's not as big of a problem as it might seem.
That being said, the compressed textures and so forth on the PC/XBox version are higher quality than those on the PS2 version, leading to larger storage requirements, which may or may not be needed if they were to do a Cube port (then again, if they didn't do a port of higher quality than the PS2 version, people would complain).
Personally, I'm still trying to justify buying the XBox double pack when I already have the PS2 games, and it's just not getting through the logic gates in my head. Considering the PS2 double pack is $10 cheaper, I doubt I'll get much for trade-in.
I played FF1 on NES. Was it released for PS too?
FF1 and FF2 (Japanese FF2, not the FF2 that was released on SNES, which is part of another PS FF package, either Chronicles or Anthology) were released earlier this year on the PS as FF Origins.
I always thought that was a bit strange also. Most games come on 1-2 CD's, with a few coming in at 3. Very few have 4 or more (a couple notable examples would be Myst III: Exile, and Buldar's Gate). I believe Buldar's Gate had a separate version available for DVD, but I'm not sure about Myst III. My only assumption is that either they're concerned about too few consumers having DVD drives, or the cost to create DVD disks is higher than I would expect.
Most of the titles using the engine from Baldur's Gate came in at 3-5 CDs. The first Baldur's Gate was the only one released on DVD afaik, and I had to look for quite a while to get it on DVD, too. Riven (Myst 2) came on DVD with one of my DVD-ROM drives. For a very short time, Fry's had a section of DVD-ROM based games, and it had a good number of titles (though small compared to even the Mac games section), but eventually publishers stopped even trying. Then again, I've heard that a couple of games coming down the pipe will be DVD, including HL2.
Aside from that, the gamers that spend $400 on a video card absolutely have DVD drives... probably DVD+/-RW drives at this point. However, that's only a relatively small niche market. If they're going to market a game, they want to reach the largest possible user base, and when the PC is concerned, that must be the CD drive... at least for another couple years. Eventually there will be an obvious shift away from the CD format. It'll probably happen as soon as Dell decides that the CD is obsolete, and DVD is the future. On the other hand, maybe they're waiting for the next big innovation in portable storage.
The funny part is that all of Dell's computers except for the absolute lowest-priced advertised PCs come with DVD-ROM drives. I think the real problem is that most of the publishers have taken DVD-ROM as a dual-format push, releasing on both CD-ROM and DVD-ROM, with the DVDs usually getting smaller numbers printed. This leads to it costing more to publish on DVD, even though the added cost is really only because it's a limited run in addition to the CD run. If a good title is released on DVD only, it would show them where the numbers really are, and push adoption for those few people that are lagging behind (when I mention DVD-ROM to people that don't have them in their computers, they ask why they would want to watch movies on their computers, it'd be nice if there was actual content for them to see). Something else that people still don't seem to understand is that DVD-ROM drives are perfectly capable of reading CD-ROM discs.
1. final fantasy is a PS title
Which he said, though I think you might be thinking of FF1 being on a single CD with FF2. He was most likely referring to FFVII, VIII, and IX, which are multi-CD titles on the PS1 and still took up enough space to be multi-disc titles on the GameCube, if it weren't for the amount of duplication between discs.
2. GTA Vice City fits in under 2 PC CD ROMs AFAIK given most CD are 700 or 1.4 GB 1.5GB CD that gamecube has
Most CDs are 650MB, but that's beside the point. You also have to remember that you're installing that on your hard drive with the PC (at least I would hope so), so it's compressed data that is extracted to your drive. How big is your Vice City directory? Also, since it is installed to the drive, they don't need to repeat any of the data on both discs, as they would have to with a console title.
3. games are getting close enough to need multiple DVDs!!! FUCK! Final Fantasy XI on PS2 comes pre-installed on the HD why?
Close, yes, but they're not there, yet. Plus, you have the differences in DVD formats and the seeming reluctance to do double-sided discs (which would still have most of the problems of multi-disc releases).
a. people don't want to install games.
b. it's too big. it took 5 PC CD ROMs and 2.5 hrs of updates on cable/dsl
Even with 700MB CDs completely filled with data, that's still 3.5GB, which leaves plenty of space on a DVD-ROM. Still, without compression, it does get tight on a single layer, single sided DVD. Not to mention the fact that you'll need the hard drive anyway to play the game, and that console players wouldn't want to spend the time to install (as you said in a) a 3.5GB game to the hard drive as well as downloading whatever updates are available the first time they connect (which, given that the drive won't be out for a few months, could be quite a bit).
so yes multiple disks are "difficult" for developers to handle but they've done it before.
It's not even really difficult, it's just wasteful in terms of having to repeat content across discs when you're dealing with consoles. Some developers still use CDs for PS2 games, it all just depends on how much space they need. Obviously, for most of them, it's cheaper to use DVDs once they get past 650MB, but they'll still use CDs for single-disc titles if they can (though they probably wouldn't do additional work to make the game fit on a CD if it's close to the barrier). I'm about 90% sure that there are maybe 1 or 2 games out there that use multiple discs on the Cube, but I don't know what they are and don't own them (anyone else know?).
Of course, I have games on my PC that span multiple discs and take up 2-4GB of hard drive space, and they're not exactly new games. At the same time, PC developers seem quite reluctant to move to DVD-ROM format, as they seem to believe that the same gamers that spend $400 on video cards won't spend $40 on a DVD-ROM drive.
How many times did you have to hit 'Next'?
;p Hell, even with Win95 it usually made such a mess of itself that it was best to format and install DOS before trying to put Win95 back on there.
Back then you didn't use a mouse to install an OS
Of course, if I had been more knowledgable, I might've been able to boot from a DOS disk and fix the configuration files that the game had decided needed to be rewritten in ASCII Chinese.
I never really got into Dark Reign. It probably has the MOST features of any RTS but it was too much. One of the problems when you add complexity is that you lose gameplay and the weaknesses in the AI start to show.
;(
:( ). One of my favourite ones (which kind of sucked but was fun) was KKND (Kommand, Kill 'N Destroy?) Ever heard of that? Not very popular but a fun game.
I didn't really have any problems with it, except that on occasion you had to micro-manage it a bit with the pathfinding AI (which was a sore point for most RTS games at that time). Support units certainly worked much better in that game than I've seen them work in any game since, excepting the case of support units being spawned from the units they support (such as the repair drones in C&C Generals and the carriers in StarCraft). IIRC, though, the default AI behaviors were not optimal in Dark Reign, but you could set the defaults at the building that produced them (again, I could be off here, I'm also pretty sure TA did the same, so I could be confusing them, and I certainly played TA much more recently than last time I tried to play DR). Dark Reign 2 had a beautiful 3D engine, but for some reason I never really got into it. DR and it's expansion also had good music in Redbook audio format, so one of my friends ended up borrowing my expansion disc and still had it in his CD changer when I moved across the country
Since RTS is my favourite genre, I played a lot of the ones (up until 2000 or so when I ended up unemployd after graduating from school
I remember KKND, but I'm not sure if I actually bought & played it. I mostly remember being slightly irritated at how antiquated StarCraft seemed when I bought it (especially after TA and DR), yet somehow getting sucked into the single player game and enjoying it anyway. With XMas coming up, I might not have time, but maybe I'll start pulling out all of my old RTS games and giving them another run, at the very least to find out how many of them work under WinXP and manage to run at normal speeds on a 2GHz CPU (which I know DR won't do).
Another good one was Homeworld (which I didn't buy/play for some reason). That's not like a traditional RTS but it was innovative.
Yep, I have Homeworld, and I think I somehow got Cataclysm for free (or maybe very cheap, I don't remember exactly). I didn't play through very much of it, though it was at the very least a strong push towards a style of game that I would enjoy. It was very cool sending off swarms of ships through full 3D space to attack enemy units from above or below and having fully 3D formations. This was especially cool considering that most other RTS games hadn't even figured out yet that air units could fly through the same area without colliding and that elevated ground meant more than just an area ground units might not be able to pass through directly.
Doom 64 wasn't a direct port. It had entirely new maps, a few new enemies, and two new weapons (some hell lazer and the Doom II double shotgun).
That's all nice, but were the graphics any different? Adding in some weapons, maps, and enemies doesn't really change the appearance of the game, nor the way the game plays. Overall, though, since I never had an N64, nor play many FPS games on consoles, I really wouldn't know beyond the fact that every Doom port I've seen has been basically the same as the original (excepting the modifications made to the Doom source release made precisely to add new features).
...and a GameCube, and probably still pay less than you would for a PS2.
Which, of course, is the problem with the Q (not to mention the limited distribution since it's not available in the US except through importers). You combine 2 different devices that are each available for ~$100 today, and it comes out to $400? Umm yeah, that'll sell.
hat sound problem was fixed, also if you set the sound quality to the lowest it works
Perhaps the most obvious question, but wtf kind of sound card do you need to use any sound quality setting other than the lowest?
Do you think Finding Nemo would have 15 million units sold already if Blockbuster wasn't buying ~80 copies per store?
I don't know, but every Wal-Mart I've been to has been buying more than that, and they weren't staying on shelves very long the first week they had them.
How many locations does Blockbuster have in the USA right now?
The last estimate I saw was 4500, but that was a bit old.
Hollywood Video is just a poor imitation of Blockbuster, always has been.
In the end of 2002 (when Blockbuster's stock was finally turning around) Hollywood Video had already had 8 straight quarters outperforming Blockbuster (in terms of percentage growth), with 1/3rd the stores (in significantly less time). If Hollywood did nothing else in those 8 quarters, it was convincing Blockbuster that they had to step up by extending their rental periods (when Hollywood Video showed up in San Diego, Blockbuster had 2 day rentals, Hollywood had 5 day rentals, and that was for old movies in both cases, with 1 and 2 days respectively for new releases). Hollywood also stocked DVDs for almost a full year before Blockbuster had them, and as a result Hollywood's selection of DVDs was better for at least a year after Blockbuster started carrying them.
Despite another poster's assertion that Hollywood's a subsidiary, the FTC blocked every attempt I could find of a merger or even the slightest hint of a deal between the two. There is some information that some higher-ups in Blockbuster purchased stock in Hollywood as private investors, but that doesn't make them a subsidiary of Blockbuster (it does lead to some questions on conflicts of interest, though).
Hmm, I didn't realize that game was that old (and I looked it up just now, looks like July 01). I've only had digital cable for about 6 months, so it's been X-Play almost the entire time I've been watching it regularly (then again, I used to watch it on satellite as Extended Play, but that was almost 3 years ago and not regularly).
The episode in which he talked about Ico was more than likely an episode maybe 2 months ago about under-appreciated games. He still managed to act like a moron while talking about Ico, though.
What I mean is that a lot of the games (not by choice) were easier to look at. Too many of the more recent games have gone "muddy low-contrast black and brown" making things rather hard to see. The worst I would say is Doom for the N-64: all dark brown and black with a few flashes of red and green here and there. Now, while it wasn't realistic, there was no annoying and pointless urge to aim a flashlight at the screen when you played old Atari-2600 "Adventure" or "Breakout"
What you must realize is that Doom is a bad example, being a 10-year-old game with a limited colour pallete caused by it's original platform's limitations at the time of creation. Most of the console versions of Doom were not much more than ports, with little to no enhancements (except, of course, to get them to work with the controllers). The same could be said about Quake, despite having steeper requirements than Doom. Q2 and Q3 had much richer colour palletes than either Doom or Q1. Many other games, even from the same time period, had better diversity in the colours used.
Not all modern games are this way, and the "cel-animation style" trend is a refreshing step toward clarity, and recent "Final Fantasy" games appear to be stepping out of the Dark Ages, achieving leading-edge "realism" without the darkness and fuzziness.
It's all a matter of the style of the game. The dark and dingy look was part of the game's look and feel in most cases, and if you didn't like it, it just meant that you didn't like that game. Even FF games from the same time period as Doom had a brighter look to them, before 'realism' started creeping in on them. Cel shading is just another look made possible by technology, and has just started to be used appropriately within the last year or so.
The Atari 2600 stuff was limited by the system's pallete. Doom and Quake were limited by the number of colours you could display while maintaining real-time play (meaning that even though a computer was capable of displaying more colours than an Atari 2600, you still could only display so many colours on the screen before your framerate went to hell while trying to render 3D images). Current games rarely run into problems with the number of colours displayed on the screen, and Q3 was among the first to actually show the usefulness of fully-realized 32-bit colour. Now, of course, John Carmack is talking about pushing on to 64-bit colour, which currently isn't supported by most hardware, and could offer who knows what kind of accuracy in displayed images.
Why not put such documents in a more Portable Document Format? Even assuming I have Word Reader or Openoffice, why on earth would you dissemante information via a word processor document format?
On Windows you have to install non-MS software to read PDF documents. This means that not only will some of MS' customers not be able to read it without downloading something, but also that anyone that can read it is using someone else's software to read it. Given this, I'm amazed Microsoft distributes anything in PDF, or even admits it exists.